Asian megastructure and queer futurity

What is the relationship between Asian megastructure and the spatial and visual production of queer everyday life in a global city like Singapore? Megastructures are promulgated by a progressive set of transnational architects in the 1960s influenced by ideas of social equality, biological process, neofuturism, and eco-fantasy (see Banham, 1976; Jenks and Dempsey, 2005; Lin, 2010; Riley and Museum of Modern Art, 2002; Sadler, 2005). As complex and symbolic attempts to solve the problems of urban density, they are ever-expanding frames to accommodate all or part of the functions of a city. Their utopic visions include vast cities floating on oceans and plug-in capsule towers with loosely aformal composition and ludic multi-functions that are infinitely reconfigurable. In the past decade, the revival of megastructural thinking is evident in large-scale infrastructural developments in parts of Asia and the Middle East. Two key examples are the global university complex, such as Yale-National University of Singapore (NUS) College and New York University (NYU)-Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, and man-made biospheres that look like fantasy islands or parks, such as Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. Rather than architectural atavism, these millennial megastructures are a broader cultural phenomenon with sizeable excitations. ¹ They are big projects and big ideas testing the limits of environmental design, mass human-scale form, and extreme engineering. How can we understand these infrastructural features and logics in visual and performance terms? What is their impact on queer and minority lives or those for whom megastructures are not ostensibly built?

This essay is a space-clearing gesture to raise a number of critical questions around its titular keywords, “Asian, Megastructure, Queer, Performance” at the intersection of architectural criticism, visual culture, performance studies, and queer studies. It seeks to interrogate the idea of megastructure in three broad phenomena that scholars in the aforementioned fields have either overlooked or tackled without necessarily engaging with each other. They have to do with race and queerness as a design and spatial complex, architecture as performance and performance as architecture, and the effects of megastructural thinking on transnational visual and performance culture. I argue that the revival of megastructure in the Asian millennium is a portal for future thinking on queer discipline and pedagogy, the poetics of biopolitics, and the intersection of sustainability and survival. Moving toward these ends, I am interested in looking at a few iconic global projects in Singapore not only as Asian megastructures but also as queer architecture and performance.

But what exactly is a megastructure and how is it “Asian”? From the Great Wall of China to the great hill on which Italian towns were built, from Le Corbusier’s Fort de l’Empereur to Paul Randolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway Project, megastructures have ancient antecedents and modern infrastructural analogies that look a certain way even if this is not clearly defined. The Oxford English Dictionary definition—“a massive construction or structure, especially a complex of many buildings”—only begins to scratch the surface. To the Japanese Metabolists who dreamed of future cities, a megastructure is “a large frame in which all the functions of a city or part of a city are housed” (Sebestyen and Pollington, 2007: 51). It can also be likened to a man-made “Mega-form” on the landscape with modular dwelling units that are ever-expanding “clip-ons” to the singular frame. For the Archigram set, an avant-garde, neofuturist architectural group based in Britain, the appeal of megastructures was found in their ethical “design of whole human environment” that emphasized “control and order” on a macro level while providing “disorder, fun, chance, consumerism and entertainment” at the brash, micro level (Banham, 1976: 287). The British architectural historian, Reyner Banham (1976), thus opines that megastructures “were large buildings of a particular kind, though what kind remains difficult to define with near verbal precision,” (p. 137). Even as their precise definition is hard to pin down, there is consensus that megastructure is the idiom of the architectural avant-garde for “one hectic decade” in the 1960s. The placelessness of megastructure as a transnational archi-phenomenon is particularly suggestive of its First World conception and privilege, which presumes mobility and expansion. It is no coincidence that megastructural constructions are mostly concentrated in developed or rich countries.

The Asian megastructure of the new millennium is a neoliberal cognate of the architectural imaginary fomented in the 1960s. For a small island-Republic like Singapore devoid of natural resources and a traditionally defined hinterland, the imagined geography of “Asia” is its major economic and cultural lifeline. Just as the megastructural movement is taking shape, Singapore became independent from the Brits in 1965 and moved closer to Southeast Asia and East Asia is its greater hinterland. Singapore’s metonymic Asianness, the way it claims to be new Asia though new Asia isn’t (only) Singapore, is an inter-Asian complication to Naoko Sakai’s critical provocation that “Asia” is itself beyond cartography, identity, or any vocative articulation of position (Sakai, 2000). Asia encompasses a vast geographic region that is more than the sum of its parts; it is also not simply oppositional to the other incongruous mytheme, “the West.” Yet it is precisely because Asia and Asian do not exist in any stable terms that Singapore needs and wants to be part of it and identified as such. A country made up largely of migrants, diasporics, and transnationals, much of its traditions are imported, adapted. Neither its disidentification with the West nor its claim of Asian heritage would clarify Singapore’s (re-)inventions of Asianness. Between a politics of strategic displacement and a politics of recognition, Singapore’s geopolitical aberrations may account for some of its Asian, megastructural tendency.

Rising rapidly to First World status within four decades of independence, the island situated at the southern tip of the Malay peninsular is often imagined beyond the Southeast Asian regional grouping as an alternately east Asian, authoritarian-capitalist, and transnational modernity with United States and European influences. Its projective “newness” or promise takes on an ideological or mythic form not unlike an ideational US American exceptionalism (thought to be) exempt from the historical burdens of Europe. But more than the fact that it is “different,” the discourse of US exceptionalism distilled from the American Dream also strongly implies it is a model for all others. The pedagogy of US exceptionalism is a major example of national will, military force, and economic power whose colonial technologies are disguised as exemplars of instruction. Singapore’s minor exceptionalism is a blend of that singular dreaming and modeling on a much smaller scale in the global South. The term is tweaked from “minor transnationalism” postulated by comparative literary scholars, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, who were interested in moving beyond a binary model of minority cultural formations along the vertical axis of assimilation and opposition (Shih and Lionnet, 2005). One of its key objectives is to account for South–South and other lateral comparative frameworks.

In borrowing the term for my formulation of minor exceptionalism, I am interested in thinking about the outsize imagination Singapore holds in the global arena vis-à-vis its area (637.5 square kilometers/247 square miles or just slightly smaller than New York City) and how its minor, megastructural complex is comparable to other postcolonial and emerging transnational cities. To put it another way, the millennial return of megastructural thinking in Singapore and the conception of the city-state itself as a megastructure marks an important turn that postcolonial critique has yet to fully explore. This is the turn from colonial (British) exemplarity to (Singaporean) minor exceptionalism comparable to the urban discourse of exceptionalism adopted by many Asian cities. One need only think about Singaporean, Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Korean exceptionalisms as East Asian Tigers (see The Economist, 2015). On the question of minor exceptionalism, a transcolonial comparative approach would relate these minor professions with each other rather than to US American exceptionalism as the major pivot. But Singapore is neither here nor there even in the Tiger economy grouping above. It is not an East Asian society. Without a linguistic or cultural claim that is “native” to Southeast Asia, it is not quite legible there either. In area studies programs, Singapore is neither covered in East Asian Studies or Southeast Asian Studies. Its national project, regional claim, and transnational formation around “Asia” are wholly inventive and aspirational.

The appeal of a masculinist Asian megaplex for Singapore is understandable in this regard. Because most megastructures are unbuilt, their seemingly unthinkable scale and decadence only feed imagined urban utopias and technofantasies. The myths are further accentuated by the agglomeration of concepts popularized in the 1960s that fused architecture and ecology, or arcology, with Pop art, futuristic visions and the Second Machine Age (see Banham, 1976; Lin, 2010; Sadler, 2005). These are all primers for engaging the gender and racial politics of megastructural thinking. Dominated by a cadre of male architects, urban planners, and artists, megastructural thinking is unmistakably phallocentric in outlook even as it bequeathed spectacular blueprints of radical urban visions and speculative world making for all. In this regard, the revival of megastructural design in Singapore, a paradoxically authoritarian, paternalistic, and free market model state with forward-thinking bureaucrats is both uncanny and excitable.

The assumed masculinism of the megastructural myth raises the urgency of understanding the cultural and queer implications of its related construction and performance projects in the new millennium. Crucially, the urban utopias and technofantasy of Asian megastructures are gendered and racialized spaces even as they appear to be unmarked. In fact, race and queerness are so deeply embedded or codified in their purportedly better design and better future vision of the world that they do not even register or matter. It seems as if the pushback around race, gender, and class analysis in what detractors call retrograde “identity politics” is now mapped onto a mega(-masculinist-)complex so big and so sleek that one could simply be lost in it. The high obfuscation produced around abusive and fatal labor practices is just one of many backstories staring in our faces that do not register. Zaha Hadid was famously quoted as saying it is not her “duty as an architect” to care about the 500 Indians and 382 Nepalese migrant workers who reportedly died in one of the construction sites of her design (Quirk, 2014). It seems imperative to ask, are megastructures the solution for or the very symptom of global inequality? For whom are they built?

To answer these questions, we need to look at architecture as performance while using performance itself as a site and method for thinking architecturally. This is key to understanding Singapore’s hyperdevelopment of Asian megastructure, which relies on the efficiency of queer discipline and its erasure at the same time. In the last 15 years, the spatial configuration of queer public spaces in the city-state reveals a proliferation of gay bars, saunas, and events that are concentrated in the Chinatown/Central Business District area. This development is permissible insofar as gay activities out in the open are regulated like other businesses or managed as gay business. Notably, many gay bars and saunas are seamlessly integrated into restored colonial shophouses as standalone units that are either inconspicuous or hard to find. This “disappearance” is part of the state’s architecture of control. It only sees homosexuality as a business or wants the business of homosexuality pushed into the realm of privatization. In either case, the austere private/public division, itself a distillation of sexual demarcation, ensures that any expression of queerness in the public eye is a form of “trigger.” Hence, the annual Pink Dot lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rally in the Speakers’ Corner has become a lightning rod even though its “Freedom to Love” campaign is based on the most banal appeal for tolerance and understanding. Part of the “crime” of queer public love is its breach of homo-containment undergirding the public/private division, which may be understood broadly as a version of heterosexual on the street, homosexual in the sheet.

Pink Dot is singled out by a local scholar to be “the trigger and catalyst” for a bureaucratic crackdown because it has grown too big and attracts too many global corporate sponsorships (Xing Hui, 2016). Foreign companies like Google and other big investment banks now need a permit to participate in the event as sponsors. To put things in perspective, the Speakers’ Corner is in a small urban park in Chinatown that is a historical venue for political speeches and rallies. Set up in 2000, it is modeled after the one in Hyde Park, London, and presents the only venue for a public “free speech area” that can only be claimed by the requisite permits. Pink Dot seized upon the symbol of this highly restricted public space to stage the city’s first LGBT rally in 2009, growing the attendance from a 1000 people to over 28,000 in 2015. Soon after Pink Dot’s inaugural event, the police installed closed-circuit television (CCTV) for “safety and security” reasons and reduced the size of the Speakers’ Corner. These regulatory gestures and the paper bureaucracy are all indices of control. Requiring corporate sponsors for Pink Dot to get a permit was seen as “a pre-emptive move to prevent foreign money from influencing ideology here, but some activists felt it stifled civil society” (Xing Hui, 2016).

The state is thus not so much “triggered” as it is asserting its power around the regulation of public assembly and speech. Besides, the collateral move to protect national hetero-ideology only puts local LGBT activists who are already avowedly patriotic on the edge. Rather what is triggered is ever more reliably homonationalist organizing on the ground that would suppress even the suggestion of queer outlooks that deviate from its normative logics (Treat, 2015). If the state’s regulation on Pink Dot appears to undermine its free market and creative capital ethos, that paradox is also a signature move of the authoritarian regime seeking “a leading role in the neoliberal world economy” (Treat, 2015: 349). ² This apparent contradiction and its uncertain politics around sexuality are encoded in the design and control of Asian megastructures that never fail to look really awesome and yet somewhat monstrous, immaculately cool, and somehow sterile.

To put it another way, the scale and aesthetics of the megastructural form, always awesome or awe-inspiring, is a way of understanding how queerness is not only disciplined but also made to be productive for the economy. The performance of queerness in the megastructural form, or megastructural queerness, extends the transnational turn of US-based lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer studies to architectural, botanical, and design studies. I have written elsewhere about how Singaporean artists and activists queer visual and performance cultures in ways that exceed binary paradigms even as they exploit the mythemes—“Asia,” “the West,” and so on—found therein (Lim, 2014a). That transnational, postcolonial, and diasporic permutations driving these glocalqueer forms is clear. That their political purchase is contingent, provisional, and unsettled is also clear. But how is the Asian megastructural form accommodating, exploiting, and disciplining queerness? Has transnational queerness become part of its function?

Singapore’s densely urban and built environment is a tremendously rich site for queering the visual and spatial study of Asian megastructure. Its location at the nexus of multiple geopolitical discourses and developmental imaginaries makes it ideal as well. Within such a mapping, the global university complex of Yale-NUS College and the billion-dollar park, Gardens by the Bay, are two curious megastructures that render themselves nicely to the inquiries and provocations I have set up above (see Figures 1 to 3). Designed to produce big ideas and life forms in ever-expanding intellectual, social, and botanical terms, they are ecological experiments of the urban future with lasting consequences. From the configuration of global pedagogy to the creation or re-making of entire “islands” by landfill such as the man-made islands of Sentosa Island in Singapore to Sadiyaat Island in Abu Dhabi, these are megaprojects with monumental developments (resorts, universities, parks, museums, performing arts centers) designed by starchitects such as Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando, Moshe Safdie, and Frank Gehry. What is the place of queerness in these megastructures that are helping to turn their home cities in the global South into centers of capital, labor, education, and entertainment?

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Figure 1.

Gardens by the Bay Project. Designed by British architects Wilkinson Eyre and landscape architects Grant Associates.

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Figure 2.

Yale-NUS College. Designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects based in US.

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Figure 3.

Yale-NUS College. The campus main gate of Yale-NUS College.

As an emerging Asian megastructure with an “island botany complex,” Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay begins to tell a story of developmental queerness that has nothing to do with any tropical paradise (Lim, 2014b). Instead, its curatorial design of botanical performance plants a high fantasy of eco-futures. Within a futuristic garden setting, all imaginable forms of plant life are carefully arranged to simulate a grand, touristic spectacle of biodiversity. They range from actual “ancient trees” like fully grown Olive Trees in the Mediterranean Garden to other plant species organized by region or continent. Unlike Logan’s Run, the 1976 sci-fi movie about dystopic life in the 23rd century, this postcolonial park stages an eerily functional order of a future island that is simultaneously an educational theme park, a sculpture garden, a movie set, and a botanical World’s Fair all rolled into it. It heralds Singapore itself as a transnational megastructure. The queerness of this clash is mitigated by the Gardens’ spatial design, which is closely aligned with principles of 20th century urban planning that segregate spaces for specific use. From the ethnic gardens, the gargantuan glass biome to Supertrees made of steel and encrusted with bromeliads and ferns, “nature” is meticulously arranged to maximize visual interest and selfie opportunity. Each flower is of interest and each journey is one of discovery. The visitor is asked to “discover the unique biodiversity and geology of cloud forests” as a kind of living museum and a mediated sensory experience. Throughout the Gardens, there are hidden speakers broadcasting the sounds of the forest and touch screens illuminating the effects of global warming and climate change.

In spite of its promise of awesomeness, the instructive over-curation only seems to reinforce the urban sterility Singapore is desperate to get rid of as an infamous “nanny state” or as William Gibson (1993) puts it, “Disneyland with a death penalty.” The sanitizing effect is predicated on the exquisite control of sexuality central to the Gardens’ botanical artifice and setup. In this regard, we see the unnatural mix of plants or garden queerness “disappear” into the superstructure of neoliberal capitalist logics and quite literally into the Asian megastructure itself. The plenitude of plants and flowers like the apparent hypervisibility of gays, lesbians, and transgenders in the media and public discourse is a false visual indicator of botanical well-being or LGBT presence. Rather, the Garden’s Victorian-style management of saturated landscape is more of an allegory of postcolonial power. It bears note, however, that the prerogative to grow foreign or non-native plant species by forced seeding, extraction, transplantation, or hothousing at the Gardens’ horticultural laboratory is a form of perverse implantation. Recalling Foucault’s power analysis of sexual regulation, the Asian megastructure’s green experiment is an analog of the state’s biopower. It tells a broader story about the regulation of the local LGBT community, particularly the gays who are subject to the greatest scrutiny. They are seen as perverse, quickly proliferating, and taking up precious little public space. What we see in this setup is the fear of the self-reproducing gay juxtaposed next to the unnatural growth of plants in the Asian megastructure. Neither is by any measure wild and free. The rich irony of this fear as a technique of the state is of course lost on both the botanical bureaucrats and the Christian fundamentalists tending to their lost paradise.

Far from a monolithic entity, the Asian megastructure also serves as a kind of infrastructural salvo from colonial models. Its landing in Singapore as a garden, university, and performance complex is a contested expression of eco-fantasy, educative empire, and artistic experimentation. Unlike their more utopian progenitors from the 1960s, the Singaporean projects appear more pragmatic or even pedantic as they take on the conception of megastructure in practical terms. Consider the curricular ambition of the Yale-NUS College to implement a “Common Curriculum … [that] spans the central knowledge of Eastern and Western traditions” (Yale University, 2016). It aspires toward a configuration of a global education with the Yale University in New Haven as its “clip-on” campus. Likewise, the splashy Asian Shakespeare trilogy—Lear, Desdemona, Search: Hamlet—by Singaporean theater director, Ong Keng Sen, are a mandate to foster a global, 21st century intercultural communication. Using different Asian theater traditions as modules for archetypal character study, Ong’s performance project wants to promote “seeing with foreign eyes” on nothing less than a continental scale. This is the cultural iteration of an Asian megastructure. Together with films dealing with Singapore’s housing megaplex such as Eric Khoo’s 12 Storeys and Royston Tan’s 15, these visual cognates to the megastructural imagination perform an explicit challenge to settled hegemonies and dominant knowledges. They are in conversation with critics concerned about the erosion of the public sphere, and the common good as private interests or privatizing end goals look to Asian megastructures as the only way forward.

Such a concern is not without merit. Asian megastructures are often embroiled in the global race to be the biggest, longest, tallest, or deepest while continuing experimentations in design, scalar thinking, and visionary living. In the case of Singapore, the Asian megastructure is merely an intensification of the city-state’s existing local megastructure, the high-rise public housing, where over 80% of Singaporeans live and 95% of those residents are owners. Entire towns made up of high-rise buildings are built from scratch. Each town is self-sustaining with its system of residential, commercial, and institutional land use, from public services, schools, police stations, wet markets to shopping malls. The efficiency with which this urban mega-project seamlessly integrates various functions in sustainable concentrations is part of Singapore’s claim to millennial fame as a global city. Singapore Math is perhaps an analogy of this success story. Widely touted as foolproof pedagogy, it is exported to rest of the developed world seeking to emulate how the country trains its kids to learn math through modular training. If the positive image of Singapore goes hand in hand with the sheer size of its infrastructural ambition and success, the dominant visuality of this megastructure would also hide many other stories.

One of those stories is queer life. How does one reconcile the scale as well as the futurity of these expensive mega-developments with queerness? If we were to go by the existing critiques in the US-based sexuality studies, the question of sexual rights would appear prominently as the precipitating factor of most inquiries. But how is the mega-form and its spatial logics implicated in social and legal forms of sexual discrimination? One could also argue that the conditions of possibility for queer lives in Singapore (and around the world) are still very much premised on piecemeal alternatives, that the struggles for gay recognition and legitimacy continue in everyday social contexts that are personal or micro in scale. ³ As is well-known, gay sex continues to be selectively criminalized in Singapore even as public events like Pink Dot, queer theater, and gay saunas appear to be proliferating in the past two decades. But the clampdown on an imagined queer public is also fast and furious as the state mandates more rather than less regulation around who gets to support the LGBT movement. To put it in a nutshell, the veneer of liberal progress, the pushback from the Christian right, and the spread of neoliberal capitalism have all generated and forestalled queer possibilities in visual and legal terms.

The provocations that I have offered here begin to clear the space for using megastructure to think about queer and urban futurities in performance, visual, and cultural terms. We need to ask how these dominant megaprojects are producing new technologies of gender, race, and sexuality not only in this city-state but also everywhere. On one hand, Singapore’s Asian megastructures bearing the imprint of educative, botanical, and performance experimentations are utopic sightings of a future arising from postcolonial senses. They invent or aspire to invent a world with better design and better organization, making a compelling case for the flexible arrangement of modular units within their respective compositions to maximize function, pedagogy, and spectacle. There would be different arrangements of classical texts for the common curriculum, changing clusters of epiphytes for the cloud forest, and an unusual mix of Asian theater traditions for the transnational performance. Certainly, a lot more has to be said about these monumental arrangements in the Asian megastructure and its staging of queer performance. ⁴

Whether or not the Asian megastructure might help to save or revivify the world’s civilizational canons, cultural heritage, and botanical species, and the visual, gestural, and sonic vocabularies produced in it are rendering an aspirational form of transnational arrangement that is both fraught and visionary. It remains to be seen what forms of queer cognizance and sexualities might flourish in the Asian megastructure. There is yet more to work around the complex coding of transnational queerness both as a major design issue and as a modality of power drawn from Foucault’s framework. This is perhaps one of the most pressing issues for queer studies in our immediate transnational future.